Mia Wasikowska

Wasikowska was born on 25 October 1989 in Canberra, Australia. She attended Cook Primary School, Ainslie Primary School and Canberra High School, and Karabar High School in Queanbeyan, which neighbours Canberra. She has an older sister, Jess, and a younger brother, Kai. Her mother, Marzena Wasikowska, is a Polish photographer, while her father, John Reid, is an Australian photographer and collagist. In 1998, when she was eight years old, Wasikowska and her family moved to Szczecin, Poland for a year, after her mother received a grant to produce a collection of work based on her own experience of emigrating from Poland to Australia in 1974 at the age of 11. Wasikowska and her siblings took part in the production as subjects; she explained to Johanna Schneller of The Globe and Mail in July 2010, "We never had to smile or perform. We weren't always conscious of being photographed. We'd just do our thing, and she'd take pictures of us."

At the age of nine, Wasikowska began studying ballet with Jackie Hallahan at the Canberra Dance Development Centre, with hopes of going professional. She began dancing en pointe at thirteen, and was training 35 hours a week in addition to attending school full-time. Her daily routine consisted of leaving school in the early afternoon and dancing until nine o'clock at night. A spur on her heel hampered her dancing. Her passion for ballet also waned due to the increasing pressure to achieve physical perfection and her growing dissatisfaction with that world in general, and she quit at the age of fourteen. However, she credits ballet with improving her ability to handle her nerves in auditions.

At the same time, she had been exposed to European and Australian cinema at an early age, and was particularly moved by Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours trilogy and Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career. Although shy and averse to performing during her school years, she was inspired to try to break into acting after seeing Holly Hunter in The Piano and Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. She felt acting in film was a way to explore human imperfections. She looked up twelve Australian talent agencies on the Internet and contacted them all, but received only one response. Despite her lack of acting experience, she arranged a meeting after persistent callbacks.